A THEORY OF INTELLIGENCE Part Two (Identity)

dhw: My reconciliation between materialism and dualism is that something immaterial can survive its material source, as we know from images surviving the materials that produce them. You replied: “Problem: there is no image until a consciousness sees it. It is all a potential image before that, photons which carry information.” […] You said there was no image, so my analogy didn’t work. Do you or do you not believe that things exist independently of our observation of them? If the photons containing the image are real, then the image they contain is real, whether I observe it or not.

DAVID: Of course things exist even if not observed. The photons carry the image as information, and it becomes an image only upon observation.

So if I didn’t see the sun, the stars, the bus, they would only be a potential image? We agree that they exist, and so all you are saying is that we are only aware of them when we are aware of them – not that they don’t exist until we are aware of them. This is all irrelevant to the theory that I am proposing, which suggests that if there is such a thing as an immaterial soul, it exists as the product of materials, just as the immaterial image of materials continues to exist even when their material source is no longer there. And I suggest that this would explain such psychic phenomena as ghosts and déjà vu, but of course it does not mean that the soul would live on as a thinking being – that is a matter of faith.